This Interagency Agreement provides funding from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the Department of Commerce (DOC) for generating universally acceptable standard test methods and reference materials to serve and support academic and commercial sector development of new generations of improved dental restorative materials. NIST shall provide the necessary services and expertise to carry out studies that will establish precisely the properties that would constitute a successful new composite restorative material and articulate how these properties can be measured reproducibly, reliably, and quantitatively. This will be accomplished by directly engaging industrial, government, and academic dental materials researchers and by working through existing standards organizations.